Here are 12 things we’ve learned from five years of donor-funded journalism

They're not just journalists: The Bhekisisa team handles everything from writing

Work at a non-profit media house? Then you know your job is not just reporting anymore. Here’s what Bhekisisa learned in its first five years.

Today, Bhekisisa is one of South Africa’s largest specialist health reporting units, but that wasn’t always the case.

In 2012, the Mail & Guardian covered few health issues. The stories that did make it into the paper went on to live out their lives buried in the paper’s online health section, which garnered less than 3 500 page views a month.

Then everything changed.

In 2013, the M&G launched Bhekisisa with support from the German government. Almost two years later, the backing of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation allowed us to launch our own website pioneering solutions-based journalism in Africa and expand our team here in Johannesburg and across the continent.

By 2017, we’d grown but so had our stories’ reach. Here’s what we’ve learned along the way.

You can read Mia Malan’s latest paper on donor-funded journalism via the Global Investigative Journalism Network here. The paper was delivered in February at the third symposium on the relationship between journalism and foreign aid in Africa and Latin America hosted in Ghana.

Mia Malan is Bhekisisa's editor-in-chief and executive director. Under her leadership, Bhekisisa’s online readership increased 30 fold and its donor funding eightfold between 2013 and 2019. Malan has won more than 20 African journalism awards for her work and is a former fellow of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University.